THE FUNCTION AND THE MEANING OF DEMONSTRATIVES IN THE REFORMATION TRANSLATIONS OF THE GOSPEL

Abstract

The paper deals with sentences introduced by the demonstrative evo (”look”) in the Croatian Reformation translation of the New Testament (Cyrillic book from 1563) in comparison with Old Church Slavonic (the Zograf Gospel), Church Slavonic-Croatian (the First printed Croatian Glagolitic mass-book), and with the other Old Croatian translations (Lectionary of Bernardin Splićanin, Kašić’s and Katančić’s Bible), Latin (translation by Erasmus), Luther’s German translation, and the English translation from the Geneva Bible. Examples are classified according to the semantic features. Cognitive grounding in the conceptual metaphor knowing is seeing and in the cultural model of seeing is discussed as a salient feature of the analysed examples, while the marking of the distinction proximal/distal is presented as a marginal feature. In this way, in the diachronic perspective, languages with a three-part system of demonstratives are equated with languages that have only one general interjection in the demonstrative function.